Stormbringer
core novel 1965 The Eternal Champion
Record
| First published | 1965 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.18 (10,568 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780583113434 |
| Internal chronology | 9 |
Synopsis
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock's 1965 novel featuring Elric of Melniboné, begins when Chaos forces abduct Elric's wife Zarozinia, prompting him to take up the sentient demon-sword Stormbringer once more even as a tyrannical alliance led by the priest Jagreen Lern threatens to conquer the Young Kingdoms through dark magic and infernal pacts. Elric, the doomed last emperor of a dying island civilization, is drawn into a war that pits the forces of Law against the forces of Chaos across the world, with old allies and old enemies alike drawn into the widening conflict. As Jagreen Lern's armies advance, Elric must decide how much of himself, and of the world he still feels bound to, he is willing to sacrifice to stop them.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Eternal Champion
- Series: The Elric Saga core; position 9 of 12 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Michael Moorcock
Notes
- From the series record (The Elric Saga): 12 novels in internal chronological order (per Saga Press's current standard edition), spanning 1965-2022 in publication. At least 4 of these are fix-ups of originally separate 1961-64 magazine novelettes (The Weird of the White Wolf, The Bane of the Black Sword, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, and, hybrid, Stormbringer); the remainder are original novels. The Sleeping Sorceress was retitled The Vanishing Tower for some US editions; the database records the earlier UK title. Publication order genuinely differs from internal order and no two secondary sources fully agree on the exact publication sequence due to UK/US divergence, internal (reading) order is used here as the primary axis since it is the one Moorcock himself settled on for the modern standard edition.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Elric Saga: position 1 of 12: next The Sleeping Sorceress (1971)
- Internal chronology, within The Eternal Champion: position 27 of 30: previous The Revenge of the Rose (1991) · next The Dreamthief's Daughter (2001)
Sources
- Moorcock's Miscellany
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elric_of_Melnibon%C3%A9
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormbringer_(novel)
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